


The Mechanical Workings of the Heart

by anrithemage



Category: Universal Century Gundam
Genre: F/F, Falling In Love, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-04
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-04 10:25:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17302916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anrithemage/pseuds/anrithemage
Summary: Marina is a hotshot mobile suit mechanic who dreams of working on Haman Karn's new mobile suit. Fate, a bit of luck and a lot of raw attraction brings Marina together not with the suit...but with its pilot.





	1. Getting Up Close

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is the first chapter not only of the new year, but in my brand new account; I wanted a fresh start, and I made a promise to my close friends.
> 
> This is the first chapter of I-don't-know-how-many, and I'll be putting up the new chapters as I finish them! Let me know any time what you think!

The way the buttons clicked was the best way to determine the age of a mobile suit. One couldn’t always tell by the look of the cockpit—even some of the newest models used surplus One-Year War seat padding to cut costs. But the control surfaces? That was a surefire giveaway. One pull on the right stick trigger and you knew right away you were in a Zaku II. At least you did if you were someone like Marina Luclin. Like most everyone else on the _Alexandria_ , Marina had grown up as a refugee at Axis, and like most other pilots, she had grown up with a wrench in her hand. But while a lot of the others had dreams of piloting suits into grand battles, Marina wanted to explore them; taking things apart to understand how they worked seemed like a better use of the machinery than just blowing it up.

And so it was that she developed a sense for the components. Switches, wires, servos—all the bits and bobs that go under the armor and that turn metal into machine; Marina built a catalogue in her brain. It’s how she knew the click of a Zaku II trigger, and it’s how she knew that this one, repurposed for this particular Gaza-C, was mis-aligned. Marina clicked her tongue, a quirk she picked up from who father who always did it when figuring out an answer.

“Yo! Dimitar!” she shouted, poking her head out of the open cockpit and down the gangway. An older man working on the adjacent Gaza-C turned and lifted his welding shield, “was I right?” he shouted back.

Marina laughed and shook her head as she lightly pushed off out of the cockpit and gently floated to the walkway railing, “you were…close. The trigger servo plate connector must be dented a bit, it’s clicking when depressed so it’s not fully pressing on the fire circuit. I’m guessing it’s something like a 20 mili delay?”

Dimitar returned the laugh. “22 mili.”

Marina smiled and stuck her tongue out. The older man kicked his surface and floated over next to her and fished out a tin of mints from his pocket, offering them to her.

“I’ll put in the work order for the new connector while you get the hell out of here and go sack. Your folks would kill me if they knew I was letting you work triple shifts,” Dimitar said.

Marina popped a mint into her mouth, “yeah, yeah I know the drill pops. I just want to prove myself, y’know? And anyhow, I figure if I get enough hours on these Gazas I can eventually get a shot at that bad boy.”

She gestured across the bay to a mobile suit dock, occupied not by a full suit, but by a frame and components—a swarm of construction and creation. Dimitar turned and looked at the project.

“Admiral Karn’s new suit huh? Have you had a chance to meet her?”

“Meet her? No way. I’d be way too nervous. I like it way better just sticking down here with my head inside a machine. And as for her new suit?” Marina began, and then lowered her voice and leaned closer to Dimitar, “I’m gonna go poke around.”

Dimitar’s eyes widened, “Marina, no. They’ll throw you in the brig!”

“Not if they don’t find out! Don’t worry about it, I’m just messin’ around, Pops,” she kissed his forehead. “I’ll see you tomorrow!”

Dimitar returned to work as Marina lifted herself over the railing and gave herself a slight push to glide gently to the bottom level and make her way towards the door to the crew quarters. As she drifted in the zero-g, her head was turned, taking in the gorgeous sight of the state-of-the-art mobile suit. To Marina it was a masterpiece under construction. Imagine, she thought, if I got to paint in a corner of the Mona Lisa. While caught in her daydream, she stopped suddenly with a gentle thud as she collided with someone coming out of the crew quarter doors.

“Whoah! Yeesh Marina what the hell!” laughed the pilot, bracing herself for balance.

“Ah Becce! Damn I’m sorry I was just—” Marina started. “You were just daydreaming about working on the new suit. Yeah girl I know, you couldn’t stop talking about it at dinner,” Becce said before narrowing her eyes, “wait are you just leaving now? How long have you been working?”

Marina crossed her arms and blew her brown bangs out of her face in a bit of feigned grumpiness, “not even that long really. Like three shifts or so,”. She broke into a wide grin.

Becce tried to be cross with her friend, but joined in the grin, and then in their both laughing. “Alright well I’ll catch you later! Let’s have a movie night or morning or whatever. I’ve got to clock some sim time.”

Marina mocked a salute to her officer friend as they went their separate ways. When she got her to her room she clicked her tongue as she twirled Becce’s officer keycard in her fingers. Sure, she felt a bit guilty at using her dexterity to lift it from her best friend’s pocket, but she hoped Becs would forgive her. Marina set her alarm a few hours from now—the next mobile suit bay dead shift. The bay would be empty, and she would finally be able to get a close look at Admiral Karn’s new mobile suit.


	2. Feeling Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marina gets a chance to investigate the new mobile suit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter two! Huge thanks to the wonderful people who edit the UC Gundam Wiki because dang, the info there is so good.

The rhythms of life on a warship had always been easy to Marina; a childhood spent as a refugee in the slums of Axis meant she was used to activity at all hours. On the streets, you never really knew what someone’s schedule was—some days someone may find works in the docks, another day they might have to dig through the trash for food. It meant that you slept light, which meant that you never felt fully rested, sure—but it also meant that you were always awake when you parents came home. Now, years later, as she laid barely awake on a starship, she still missed her parents deeply and some part of her still held on to the wish that they would walk through her door.

Marina had set her alarm to wake her at the time closest to a “dead” time, at least for the mobile suit bay. Since there was no ready-alert, there would be one hour in which no one was scheduled for shifts. Her eyes opened moments before the alarm’s time, and a light press on the clock meant that no sound would come. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stretched her arms high with a huge yawn and began to feel the mix of excitement and fear building within her about her sneaky mission.

She stood in her bathroom and stared at herself in the mirror, blinking slowly in the process of both still waking up and attempting to settle the butterflies in her stomach. A quick shower would be good, she thought.

Her mental checklist needed some revising, she thought as she went through the motions of the shower. “Only one hour, which means I need to prioritize what I want to see…” she said aloud. Marina often drifted in and out of speaking out loud through her mental processes. “…if there is a psychommu frame, then its control interface would be new to me…” She continued, rinsing the soap from her long legs.

As a child and teen, she had been teased by girls for being too tall and by boys for having too small a chest—teasing that, like with anyone, formed a small inner voice of dissidence within her self-esteem. As an adult though, she had mostly quieted it. Sure, Marina thought, I don’t spend as much time at the gym as Becce, but if I haven’t had a big meal and I flex my stomach muscles I can see my abs. She felt content with herself and could even clean up nice if she wanted to. A couple months back while docked at a station for resupply, Marina had a very out-of-character one-night dalliance with a woman she ran into grabbing a coffee.

Marina stood and spaced off as the water ran over her and thought of the coffee blonde, the smell of the woman’s hair and the delicate scratching of nails on her back. Marina put one hand on the shower wall in front of her and ran a finger down the valley between her breasts and thought of the woman’s breath on her neck. She began to feel flushed, and unconsciously rubbed her thighs together slightly… and then she laughed out loud.

“Get a grip girl, yeesh” she chuckled to herself. Sure, she had needs, and it had been months since she’d been with anyone, but right now she needed to feel up this new mobile suit more than herself.

Now dressed and with her short hair tucked under a cap, Marina whizzed down the corridor with the assistance of the movement-assistance handles, finally coming to the door to the mobile suit bay. She took a deep breathe and tapped Becce’s card on the access lock, and smirked as it blinked green and the door slid open.

Marina was greeted with the most wonderful sight: an empty bay and an hour to work within it. With a push-off, Marina was floating fast towards the new suit, taking in every section of it as it got closer and closer. With a little less grace than she had wanted, she was at the gangway railing and flipping around it. Marina was right in front of the cockpit, and it seemed to be largely complete.

Feeling her nerves retreat gave rise to giddiness and focus; she had limited time. She turned to the terminal on the gangway and started digesting the specifications:

> _Model name: AMX-004 Qubeley_
> 
> _Generator Output: Minovsky UFR; 1820KW_
> 
> _Total Thrust: 2x30800KG_
> 
> _Maximum Acceleration: 1.08g_
> 
> _Sensor Radius: 10900m_
> 
> _Armaments: 2x Beam Saber; 10x Psychom. Funnels_

Marina felt a chill run up her back. “Funnels…” she whispered to herself, unmounting the datapad from the terminal and drifting into the exposed cockpit.

It was an incredible work of engineering and next generation technology, and Marina went to work disassembling, reassembling and understanding the technology: a small pressure tweak here, a slight re-alignment of the weight ratio distribution for better balance there, a subtle change to the beam sabre density mechanics for a 0.8% energy efficiency boost—she was on a roll, utterly in tune with the machine.

But she hadn’t yet touched the one system that intrigued her the most—the Psychommu system. Envisioned as the absolute zenith of mobile-suit-to-pilot interfaces, the Psychommu would read the electrical brainwaves of a Newtype and use them to control the machine; in the case of the Quebley, it controlled the movement of the funnels. With time running short, she knew she might not get another chance, and with a short fleeting hesitancy, engaged the system.

Marina’s eyes shot open as she felt a tingle travel across the front of her head to the back, then to the front again. A feeling of electricity bounced around all of her nerves and her memories and feelings flooded her. Her parents, her lovers, her pain, her joy, it all came to her at once in a flash. She deactivated the Psychommu in an instant, and exhaled loudly, feeling exhausted all of a sudden.

She sat, stunned at the feeling. “Is this what a Newtype feels?...” she wondered aloud, just before noticing the time; she was almost out! Making sure to not leave any trace of her being here (aside from her tweaks and modifications, that is), Marina pushed off the railing towards the exit, spinning herself in the air so she could look at the Quebley as she drifted down.

Marina knew right away that she needed more. She needed to work on this machine full time. But right now, she needed some coffee and some food.


End file.
